Page 89 of Fierce Highland Magic

My hand stayed at my side.

"No."

"The toll bills how badly you want to reach the center." The vendor's smile was almost sympathetic. "You want it very badly. The price rises accordingly."

I tried to think of something else. Something smaller. A childhood pet's name. The taste of birthday cake at nine. The pattern of wallpaper in a room I had slept in once and never thought about again.

The vendor waited.

"There is no negotiation," they said. "The market has already chosen. You can only decide whether to give it or turn back."

Turn back to what? The Pavilion door standing open? Ailith's kind eyes and her offer of peace that was not peace?

I extended my hand.

"Yes," I said.

The vendor's fingers touched my palm.

Gone.

I stood on the path, and I couldn't remember how my mother said my name. I knew she had said it—thousands of times, probably, over the course of my childhood. I knew the sound had meant safety once, the way certain sounds do when you are small and the world has not yet shown its ugliness.

But the specific tone was gone. The exact texture of her voice wrapping around those two syllables was gone. I could remember that there had been a voice. I couldn't remember what it sounded like.

The silence where it used to be stretched out inside me.

The path opened. I walked through.

The crossing came without warning—a place where the path split into three, each branch vanishing into the papery gray of the failing light.

Mòrag stood in the center.

She was in her pony form, dark and solid and absolutely still. Her mane hung lank with moisture that might have been mist or might have been something else. Her eyes tracked me as I approached, and there was no warmth in them. There was no coldness, either. Just the flat attention of something that didn't think about kindness or its absence.

"You're still walking in," she said.

"Yes."

"Could carry you."

The offer hung in the air between us. Mòrag could carry me—I remembered that from earlier in the night, a fact filed away under "resources." The kelpie could carry riders. The kelpie only charged the fare.

"Which direction?" I asked.

"Out." Her voice was gruff, flat, the consonants bitten off at the ends. "Only out. Never in. The center doesn't want hooves."

"Then no."

She nodded once in acknowledgment.

"Your feet, not mine."

I started past her, toward the left-hand path—the one that smelled faintly of copper beneath the sugar, the one that felt like it led somewhere that mattered.

"You ride heavy now," Mòrag said.

Her head tilted, equine and knowing.